Help:Children
Familypedia's specialized software allows easy display of an individual's children and (if either parent has a standard page) siblings. Standard start The standard input form for new individuals has a section with boxes for adding children of the first-named and second-named partners, along with notes and sources for each group. It does not reappear after the first save. See a separate section below for how you later add or edit children. Entry and display Children of a particular partner are to be listed on the form in a single box separated by nothing but single "plus" signs (and optional spaces). Do not use your "Enter" key. Each name should be in the standard page name form, i.e. generally including birth surname and at least a birth year or a death year in parentheses. Do not include question-marks, slashes, semi-colons, or square or curly brackets. Display of the children will be in a separate box for each partner group (headed by the parents' names), created by , a template that can later be moved around on the individual's page using a normal edit. Each child will have its pagename as a link in the first column; if the child has a separate standard page, detail from that page will be shown in other columns. Those details include: dates and places of birth and death; and partners. To show details of children before they have their own pages, or even after it if you want to say more about them on the parent's page, a separate table and/or list may be added below the template. An example is at John Vivion III (1714-aft1791). You may include that detail in the "Notes" field, but that is not ideal because it generally displays near the bottom of the page and can be far removed from the child list; also there can be a notes size limit, which causes failure of display if it is exceeded. Seldom any need to insert or edit any child twice If the individual has only one child-producing partner, and that partner has a separate page that shows the children, the individual does not need any separate typing to get them displayed on his or her page if the individual is properly linked to the partner. All it needs is , mentioned above. If a form for children of that partner appears (as is normal on creating a page), ensure that it is blank, so that the software will always retrieve the latest version from the partner's page. After the first edit, that individual's article code should show just the bare template, , to get the automatic addition. However, if a person had children by two or more partners you need to show them all on that person's page, because if any children are specified the software will not look for children on any partner's page. Adding or editing children To edit children when there is already a box on the page for one or more children of an individual, we used to be able to click its "Edit child facts" link. The resulting form let us edit that box and add or edit any others required for children with another parent. If no children box is present, the above form took an additional click to reach: click the "edit facts" link on the main infobox (or "Edit with form" from the Edit menu); the person form has a link to the children near the top, near other links such as advanced form, sensor page, and editing without form. :A Wikia management software change in late 2014 disabled that form. Until it is fixed, standard "Edit" is required. '' Every individual's page should have on it unless there could not have been children. Add it if necessary, then you may need to adapt lines from the "semi-manual method", which can be reached from the "Create or edit article" menu at the top of most pages. For convenience, the code is shown here too. The resulting code should look like this (where "g1" means "group 1", i.e. the children of the first listed partner: ((showfacts children |children-g1=(names joined by plus signs) |children-g1_notes=(free text) |children-g1_sources=(free text; sources separated by "") }} There could also be children-g1_sources_primary= and children-g1_sources_secondary=. The "children-g1" (etc) lines can be repeated with a number change if required for additional groups of children (by different partners). Siblings An individual's page can show siblings, automatically updated, using a template, if there is a facts page containing children of each relevant parent. Formerly used was , but from around the end of 2012 we standardized on (which displays in boxes very like the child boxes) and shortened it to ' '''. We then included it in the standard Form:Person/preload. As it creates its own heading, if you upgrade an older page you may get two headings; delete the manual one and put all free text under the new template. (The heading is needed even when there are apparently no siblings, so that users can either state that there were none or add manual detail of siblings, particularly those that do not yet appear automatically because of having no completed parent page.) See Template:Showfacts_siblings_via/doc for a little more detail, particularly for the situation where the individual's father does not have his own article. Some of us like to show the siblings above the children boxes for chronological correctness, which is easy to do with an ordinary edit, just moving the whole " " up on the page. See also * category:helpcategory:SMW help*Help